Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Editor's Note: If robots eat the dead for fuel, will they make people dead when hungry?

Live Science - July 15, 2009, by Robert Roy Britt

A steam-powered robot is being designed to fuel itself by consuming organic material, from grass to furniture or even dead bodies, Fox News reports.

But c'mon, could the U.S. military really deploy something to do that without a global outcry? The 'bot, from Robotic Technology Inc., is called the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). It can "find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass."

According to the company's web site, the purpose of EATR:

"To develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable."

Read entire story>>

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comments
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Nice linkbait. The military is not going to fuel its robots on anything that's fundamentally against pretty much everyone's ethical principles. This research is to allow the robots to run by burning wood, leaves, paper, etc when they need to.They can use corpses for fuel in exactly the same way steam engines can, but don't.